A hypoxic ticket to the bone metastatic niche.

Hypoxia is a well-characterized driver of aggressive cancer phenotypes, including metastasis. Accumulating evidence suggests that, in addition to having local effects, the consequences of tumour hypoxia can be systemic, leading to the formation of pre-metastatic niches that can later foster metastatic colonization in distant organs. Recent findings have demonstrated that such niches can also form in the bone, possibly revealing new avenues for therapeutic intervention

Visualization of the Wisdom Cube Scientific Knowledge Space for Management and Leadership

Knowledge creation in organizations is crucial for their continuing existence. We are interested in querying and understanding what we know, how we know, what we do, and how we can justify everything so that we can lead and manage organizations. Therefore, it is important to follow the epistemological tradition, i.e., Episteme. This, however, is not enough, as reasoning has to go hand in hand with knowledge creation, i.e., Sophia, to know why things are done, what concepts are used, and what goals are possible. Techne, in turn, together with scientific and theoretical knowledge, develops new important technical and practical knowledge to make things happen. These three knowledge dimensions still lack real hands-on practical knowledge and wisdom, i.e., Phronesis, to show how and to know what should be decided. This research paper shows how the four different dimensions of knowledge can be used to understand the philosophical background of knowledge and wisdom creation

The Company Democracy Model for the Development of Intellectual Human Capitalism for Shared Value

Democracy is difficult to define because it is so difficult to understand and apply in practice. Unsuccessful definitions and practice of democracy can have catastrophic results, such as anarchy and idiocy. Democracy therefore needs protective and applicable frameworks, although too much protection runs the risk of making it less democratic. Metron Ariston, a Delphic Maxim, may contribute towards a reasonable definition of democracy and give us possibilities to apply it in practice. Democracy in speech and actions can be demonstrated based on the shared value produced. Shared value in business, in turn, has been defined so that it covers the economic value creation inside a company as well as creating value for society according to its needs and challenges. The target is to achieve economic success through company activities so that all the stakeholders get their own share. In this way, shared value can be seen as a creative means for meeting social requirements as well as a tool to develop company democracy. However, this activity needs a lot of insights, ideas, initiatives, and innovations to meet the outside risks, challenges and requirements in the changing world. Shared value should be seen more as created added value so that the added value is delivered continuously as a shared value in the whole society. In this paper, we combine the ideas of shared added value as well as the developed company democracy model to present the synergistic effects in a business context

Proactive Vision for Strategy Making

Strategy makers have expressed the need for computer support systems, which they can readily use to monitor, diagnose, analyze and synthesize the current performance of their organization and estimate its future potential, direction and performance. The computer software industry has attempted to meet this demand for many years; however, in this context, the computer-based executive support and decision support systems developed so far have provided only partial solutions. These systems have supported either specific processes or specific activities. They have not provided executives with the kind of support that would enable them to acquire a holistic understanding of the constructs, concepts, variables, specific issues, and also the relations and interrelationships that must be monitored and mastered in strategic planning and implementation. In this paper, we present a new way to analyze the current and future states of company strategy. We have used the Continuous Strategy ontology as a basic construct that incorporates many current strategic constructs, concepts, and ideas, culminating in an application that contains an ontology in which we have fixed linguistic statements. Through these statements, users can analyze the current strategic situation as well as future possible improvements to the current strategy. The system operates on the Internet and this is the first prototype application constructed for this purpose. The first test runs are only to demonstrate the ideas. In the future, this application will be tested in real strategy work in business life.© 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The applied philosophy concept for management and leadership objects through the Company Democracy Model

Humans must be in focus when companies are improving performance in business. Applied philosophy for management and leadership places humans in the company context as living entities aligned with the business management and leadership objects in the conscious experiences of the company workforce. Starting with Hellenic philosophy and drawing on more modern philosophies relevant to everyday business, the applied philosophy concept in management and leadership can harness business ontologies, taxonomies, classes and other knowledge classification techniques in order to create added-value in companies. The holistic concept of man and the circles of mind models open up the human mind and situationality in a new way, giving new alternatives in terms of understanding how humans, as decision makers, behave in a company context. This article explores the applied philosophy concept for management and leadership in order to develop a more practical description of the Company Democracy Model

Delphic Maxims Based Applied Philosophy for Business and Governance Management

Knowledge analysis and representation is significant in defining situations before they are implemented through action. Knowledge engineering precedes knowledge management and knowledge utilization needs knowledge creation. In the race for capturing and mastering knowledge, emphasis is given to the development of intelligent methods and tools to understand the human mind, but not the human being itself. To tackle this complexity, it is necessary to seek knowledge in non-trivial sources via root cause analysis models of philosophical wisdom, which usually provides the answers. As problems become more complex over time, synergies of knowledge disciplines are critical and necessary. This paper presents a triadic categorization approach, based on classes, taxonomies, and ontologies of the Delphic Maxims, and their analysis by cognitive models in an attempt to reveal their contribution to modern business and governance management through the essence of the Hellenic contribution to the global economy, civilization and humanity

Democratic Culture Paradigm for Organizational Management and Leadership Strategies - The Company Democracy Model

Democracy is one of the most powerful words in the world. A word that indicates justice, equality, development, prosperity, respect, freedom, rights, fairness and many other significant meanings that no other word in any language can express better. However, managing, leading, achieving, and sustaining democracy in its true meaning is very difficult, not to say almost impossible. In this research we developed and defined a democratic company culture method and revealed its main components through a new organizational co-evolutionary spiral method and a process for creating a culture that suits different organizations. Companies can create new knowledge, initiate, innovate, understand, perceive and apply the results from the method and manage and lead the company to improve the degree of democratic company culture. Theoretically, the overall procedure adopted in our research is the same as that which has been presented for human and company performance improvement. First, the actuality is viewed through the current democratic behavior. Then the capability and the potentiality in the organization are examined. In this process, the indicative critical issues addressed and answered are: Actuality > what are we managing to do now for our organization’s democratic behavior? Capability > what could we achieve now to develop democratic behavior in our organization? Potentiality > what could we be doing to develop our organization’s democratic behavior? This paper presents our first approach towards identifying and defining the degree of company democracy

Circulating Tumor Cells: Come Together, Right Now, Over Metastasis.

Circulating tumor cells (CTC) are the source of metastases, but only an infinitesimal fraction of them eventually succeed in colonizing a distant organ. New results show that CD44-dependent aggregation in the circulation provides CTCs with cancer stem cell-like characteristics, suggesting an explanation for the low metastatic efficiency of CTCs, but also avenues for therapeutic intervention.See related article by Liu et al., p. 96

The World Innovation Stock Exchange - shared value for individuals, business and society

Innovation appears to be the new buzzword of the global economy, but things are not that simple. The critical questions are: What is innovation? Innovation for whom? and for what? Who can judge what is innovative, what is not, and why? Likewise, it is hard to define who is an innovator and who is not. The value of innovation is determined by the acceptance and the return it has in the society. The socioeconomic impact of innovation was and remains one of the most important issues in its definition and evaluation. What the world expects from insights, ideas and innovations are not new profit-making methods but most of all products and services with clear added value for the people, the economy and society. What the world also expects today is that a world wide web for insights, ideas and innovations could help people, companies and societies to create new added value for sustainable growth. This all means that somehow the demand and supply of insights, ideas and innovations should meet continuously and effectively on the commercial markets. The World Innovation Stock Exchange Organization (Www.InnovationStockExchange.org) is a state-of-the-art knowledge and innovation management initiative based on the concepts and theories of democratic innovation through freedom of knowledge expression. In this paper, we describe in detail how this organization operates and what kinds of possibilities it creates for people, business and society. The shared added-value created through the marketplace gives continuity to business as well as societies, based on individual capacity, skills, capability, creativity, know-how, competence, as well as different individual initiatives

Public Sector Transformation via Democratic Governmental Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship

Human capital utilization fails under the integration of the knowledge management and leadership disciplines. Public sector organizations traditionally lack effective human capital utilization due to bureaucratic operations and structures that restrict knowledge sharing incentives and initiatives. This, however, can be achieved with knowledge democratization methods that should be related to the obligation public servants have to share knowledge and experiences for the effectiveness and sustainability of their organization. The co-evolutionary organizational culture of the Company Democracy Model can be used to implement such an approach. This paper evolves the Company Democracy Model (CDM) into the Democratic Governmental Intrapreneurship Model (DeGIM) and extends it to the Democratic Governmental Entrepreneurship Model (DeGEM). Furthermore, it proposes an organizational structure through which DeGIM and DeGEM can be applied at the local or national level through a centralized authority that can empower the contribution of the public sector to the national economy